Emil Michael, the Department of War's Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, laid out the core engineering puzzle facing America's next generation of laser and microwave weapons during a recent conference panel appearance. As Michael put it, "the stronger the beam is, the bigger the munition it can take down" and the farther it can reach, but that added power comes at a cost: the system itself gets bulkier and harder to move. He posed the challenge facing engineers directly, asking how the size of these systems can be shrunk down enough to make them mobile without sacrificing the punch that makes them useful in the first place. Michael, who also serves as the department's chief technology officer, has made what he calls Scaled Directed Energy one of just six critical technology areas the Pentagon is racing to advance, with the explicit goal of engineering laser and microwave systems that perform well across a wide range of battlefield scenarios rather than excelling in only one.

The comments build on a broader Pentagon push to move directed energy weapons out of the lab and onto the battlefield faster than ever before, following recent live demonstrations at White Sands Missile Range that tested systems built by multiple military branches and industry partners. Officials have openly discussed fielding scaled directed energy capability within roughly three years, a sharp departure from decades of slower-moving laser weapon programs that never quite made it to widespread deployment. The urgency stems largely from the need for a cheaper way to knock down waves of incoming drones and missiles without burning through expensive interceptors every time, since a laser or microwave weapon can fire repeatedly at a fraction of the cost. With billions of dollars now flowing into the effort, including funding tied to the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile defense initiative, Michael's remarks underscore just how central solving the size-versus-power tradeoff has become to delivering real, usable directed energy weapons to troops in the field.